Machine troubleshooting !! My job for today!!#1

Hello Steemians,

As many of the other people around the world, i have a day job...
I work on a technical department on a small but cool company.

Today i had to go on a technical assistance to a customer due to some problems on his newly bought machine.

The machine displayed an error on startup and wouldn't let any interaction between the user and the machine until you solve it.

The error was related to a constant interrupted Infrared sensor. These Infrared sensors are composed of a photo diode emitter which emits an infrared wavelenght of ~750 nm to ~1250 nm and a photo diode receiver, which picks up the same wavelength in form of a invisible beam shot from the emitter to the receiver.

So to test all the infrared sensors i needed to go to the electronics board where they all connect. On the board there are measuring points that display the voltage signal of each sensor.
The machine has 6 IR sensors and a measuring point for each one on the electronic board for testing when it is closed or open, interrupted or uninterrupted.

Here you can see when the sensor beam is interrupted with a strip of paper and the value of voltage is 4.9 V:

And here the sensor beam is not interrupted and you read on the multimeter 2.5~2.6 V

I haven't told you yet but this solves the identification of the real problem because, while measuring the other sensors uninterrupted, the value read is of 0.35 V. This means that the problem relyes on this specific sensor and obviously needs replacing.

I used also further info from the technical manual which states that the reference voltage for detection of the sensor is 2.5V and then it considers to be in a state of interrupted, which is the source of the error displayed at startup.

For now the customer will have to wait for the replacement sensors( both emitter and receiver) as we did not have spare's in stock...

Hope you like this bit of my day.

Peace!

@jskronos